I don't think it's feeble mindedness. I think it's more the sheer volume of the bullshit and the way it's very carefully crafted to include heavy duty emotional triggers so that it gets under the skin. Unless you have a well developed bullshit detector and the spine to keep it running under duress, you're going to end up caving to the meta-narrative values.

Fear can physically prevent humans from being able to think clearly. It's the vaso-vagal response. And it's being exploited by media/corporate/political propaganda very effectively.

The media should face heavy penalties which make them think twice about making such blatantly untrue accusations in the first place.

No, they really shouldn't... One of the downsides of a free press is that they can also print crap... All you can do is encourage them to behave better... If you start making journalists fearful about what they print then the public interest isn't served... You don't tackle this sort of thing by being punitive...

What you can do is make them print retractions of false claims in the same size, in the same amount of words, and on the same page as the original stories. This would at least force journalists to thoroughly fact check before they start making allegations, something which they should really be doing already anyway.

"You don't tackle this sort of thing by being punitive." Of course you do. In Canada you cannot print or televise blatant lies and it's working for them. That's why Fox News decided to not establish a channel there. There are plenty of things to write about without having to write blatant lies.

How can you claim that the press is "free", when 70% of our press in this country is owned by the same company, with the same political influences?? It's hardly free. It's called a propaganda machine. Which is why there needs to be laws governing factual content, so we can have an actual 'free' press. Or at least something slightly closer to it.

How can you argue that it benefits anyone to allow the media to print lies and untruths?

There is a reason there are defamation laws. To protect innocent people from having lies about them being printed by lazy journalists who can't be bothered to fact-check, or partial journalists with a political agenda.

How can you argue that having a fearful press benefits anyone??? Most articles are already passed through lawyers before being published and there are defamation laws to act as deterrents... We already have these measures why would you want the press to be fearful as well??? The door swings both ways on this and you can't expect all of the press to be honourable knights in shining armour fighting for the public good...

We do have laws about that, defamation laws. Milne almost certainly crossed the line, so the article was pulled. Bolt didn't make any claims that I can see would be considered defamatory and went to pains to drive the point home that he didn't agree with some allegations.

And you could also imagine the start of the conversation that FM management had with Michael Smith: Mike, mate, we love your work, really love it, but the rest of the world thinks you're a huge cockhead.